Yes and now. Every chemical analysis is basicly guessing, because no substance presents itself: Hey, I am Carbonbihydroxide! There are several tests which can give you a quite conclusive set of clues, what substance you are looking at. "Quite conclusive" in this case means: Better than 0.999999... probability.
That's the same way server fingerprinting works. Run several tests, and each of them increases the probability for one and lowers the probability for others. It gets quite hard to modify a server in a way that it responds exactly like another one (error messages, timing, matchting between OS type and DNS server: You won't find WINS running on OpenVMS that easily.)
Of course it's not definitive. But it gets very close to several nines in probability.
Ok. Take any Peugeot (Peugeot sells all Diesel engines with particle cleaner). If you have a Ford Focus, you should compare against a Peugeot 307hdi with similar displacement. I guess they are absolutely comparable in emissions. The Peugeot just gets about half the distance more from a gallon.
So after all, given the same technical effort put into cleaning gasoline exhaust and diesel exhaust, they are on the same level. Currently for a Diesel to get to the same cleanliness level than a gasoline engine, you just need an oxydation catalysator, differently than for gasoline, where you have to have a lambda sond regulated catalysator, which does both, either burning the remainings of the gasoline or reducing the nitroxyde (basicly a lambda catalysator is just trying to balance the amount of unburnt gasoline and carbonmonoxyde against the creation of nitroxyde). In Europe you can already buy several cars fitted with Diesel cleaner (oxydation catalysator), and the Diesel is required to be low in sulfur.
This is not correct. Modern vine plants consists of two different parts. The root is from american wild vines, which are resistant agains the vine louse. The vine louse is an insect of american origin which lives on vine roots. The european vine species aren't resistant against this insect, so when the vine louse came with some infected vines from America, it caused a catastrophe. Talk about monocultures...
The part of the plant which is above the earth is still the old, traditional european vine. The noble vine gets transplanted onto its cousin's roots, its own roots are cut off and similar the twigs of the base vine. If you plant such a two part vine, you have to take care. If you put it to high in the earth, the base vine may grow its own twigs, which don't carry the right grapes. And if you plant it too deep, the noble vine may grow roots, which can be attacked by the vine louse.
So european law demands that all vine plants are two part, with a vine louse resistant base vine, to avoid a second attack by the vine louse. Next time you have chance to visit a vineyard, pay a look to the vines. Where they grow out of the earth, they have a thicker, round part. This is, where base vine and noble vine are transplanted together.
Nobody says "windows" as a generic term for "operating system" unless they are terminally stupid.
I remember once to dispute with a quite intelligent but somewhat computer illiterate woman about the weaknesses of Windows. She was contradicting me the whole time and not accepting the flaws I pointed out.
Later I realized she was using a Mac, and for her the Mac desktop was "Windows" because it had many of them. Talk about generic terms...
No. It was indeed a wise man from the Netherlands. But the Netherlands are so unimportant in the view of the world, that the world even don't get the capital right. "Just some small, quite prosperous country at the Northern Sea... Was it t'Gravenhage? Or Copenhagen?" (The Hague is called in Dutch Den Haag or t'Gravenhage;) )
The biggest problem with semantic meta data is, that Semantics are still unparseable for programs. Otherwise we would already have the program that understands newspapers and answers questions about the articles.
There will always be something you can't fit in the current semantic model. And you can't foresee the exact semantic someone is questioning when your piece of information may be useful to him. Semantic meta data is nothing else than predicting the questions someone may ask about your content. There will always be a question you didn't thought about, even though your content may answer it.
You can easily try it for yourself: Think a simple statement like "The sky is blue", and then start to find questions where this statement is a correct answer. "How is the sky?", "What is blue?" are just the trivial ones. What if someone asks "How's the weather with you?", or "What is the visual result of the Raleigh dispersion?"
As you can easily see: There are hundreds and thousands of possible semantic meta data to even a simple statement. A codified semantic metadata system will always be a subset of the possible, and the subset does not necessarily cover your needs. Semantic metadata, as it currently is used, is no semantic at all, it's just an extended syntax, because programs can analyze syntax, but they don't understand semantics. It is an old hope in the AI research, that a sufficiently sophisticated syntax will magically turn into semantics, but we didn't reach the point yet.
Now, WHAT IF there was actually code copying into Linux? How useful would Groklaw be then, if every day it was 'bad news'?
Then a more technical site as Groklaw would have tried to find out, what parts of the code are actually tainted and should be replaced as soon as possible. Thus we may have a slightly different kernel now, probably with some parts of code reviewed and better coded than before, which otherwise no one would ever have looked into because they just worked (UNIX has 30 years of development and bugfixing behind, so some of the code may be quite bugfree, even though somewhat dated and not fully profiled for today's use.)
Groklaw is just one line of defense in the case Intellectual Property claims vs. Free Software/Open Source. There are others. Stacked behind or defending other places. It is important to have them even though they may not be attacked in the current case. With Groklaw's help Linux (and together with Linux) the Free Software movement looks more clean than one year before, when the suspicion of inadvertedly added code was not easily to rebuff because of still unsorted information.
Now you can even quote the case to the FUD affected C(E/T/I)Os and tell them: Look: A company in possession of the full source code of UNIX, AIX, Dynix and Linux and with a clear dedication to find infringement had had more than one year's time, and it still can't come up with a single line of code in Linux that was tainted. How many cases of IP theft have been decided in the closed source world in the same time against the infringer, even though the plaintiff didn't even had access to the source code? If you really want to avoid legal hassles about infringment, go with open source and free software, because in the other world you never know.
This is the most misunderstood ruling concerning links in the whole of Germany's juridical history. The Hamburg ruling effectively said: A general disclaimer doesn't get you out of prison. And what do all those webmasters? They put a general disclaimer in their website, citing the ruling and say: It has to be, otherwise we will be in prison. Doesn't anyone ever bothered to read the ruling at all? The Hamburg ruling was against a webmaster who tried to argue that the link he was putting on his website was legal because of the disclaimer in which he stated that he refused responsibility for all links he was providing. And the court said: If you want to distance yourself from the contents a link may provide, you have to do so either specifically in the context of each link, or you have to explain why you can't take responsibility for certain links. Look at it like this: If someone asks you were he could get cheap car electronics, and you say: Don't make me responsible, but I would try the flea market over there, they sell electronics "dropped from the truck", you are supporting crime, even though you put the general disclaimer in front. If you say: Stay away from the flea market, they may be cheap, but I doubt the legality of their offerings, then you make clear, what you think about those offerings. This would have been a valid disclaimer. Be very, very careful with the general disclaimer. One of the linked sites may sue you for libel, because if you distance yourself from them without valid cause, you are just badmouthing them. And puhlease! Before you are going to put one of those cut&paste disclaimers citing the Hamburg ruling on your website, either read the ruling yourself or ask someone with some law background about the consequences. Those disclaimers don't help you. That's what the ruling, you are quoting, says. The justice will just shake his head and ask you: Why do you quote the ruling and in the same step do exactly the thing the ruling was damning?!
You are not wrong, but an exception. Being a sysadmin I can tell you that having OOo ready saves my day every week, when an user comes to me again complaining about not being able to open a document with Word.
Excel makes less problems to me, but I think that Excel was and is the best product Microsoft has to offer anyway. They were quite lucky with their decision in 1987 to drop MultiPlan and buy Excel instead.
And? There are enough third world countries from 50 years ago that now are an economic tread to the U.S. economy. Think about China, India, South Korea, Taiwan... they don't have the same standard of living than the U.S., but they are successfully attracting U.S. business or took it already away from U.S. Clothing and consumer electronics are no U.S. industries anymore.
Other countries are falling back and are now thirdworldly, even though they looked so promising 50 years ago. Argentinia for instance once was the seventh largest economy in the world.
Most countries that are fighting each other and spreading AIDS as you said, weren't even countries 50 years ago. In most of Africa, the movement towards independence just started 50 years ago (Algeria 1956), and it didn't succeed everywhere for another 15 years.
A german court can't award financial damage during a criminal process. If you want to claim financial damage, then you have to enter the trial as a "Nebenklaeger" (secondary plaintiff) and prove that you were financially damaged by the actions of the defendant.
I guess most people will be afraid to fully disclose in court how their IT management works and how their other business processes run to prove the amount of money they have lost due to Sasser.
There are four different approaches to handle several cores.
a) Tread them like different processors. This requires you to use either an SMP capable operating system (virtually all Unices, Windows NT Series Server edition) to fully leverage the advantages, or... (Operating system level)
b)...have your software being aware of multiple cores and use a multithreaded approach. So calculations can be split into different treads and those dispatched to different cores. (Application level)
c) Have your compiler optimize the software for parallel execution of instruction during the compile process. That means for instance to try to fit operations together in a way that two consecutive operations don't depend on each other. (Compiler level)
d) In the prefetch queue of the processor check for interdependencies between operations. If two operations are independent of each other you can put them into different cores and execute them in parallel. (super scalar processor)
Those four approaches are more or less coupled together.
a) is a special case of b), if you call the operation system a special application which governs all other applications. If your computer is supposed to run only a singlethreaded application at a time, then having an SMP operating system doesn't really speed up your work (ok... printing in background works better;) ), if the application doesn't use multiple threads.
On the other hand having no SMP aware operating systems means that one core gets most of the work because it runs all processes. Even multicore aware programs are started on the first processor and only dispatch certain threads to the other cores.
c) and d) are also tightly coupled. If the compiler is able to optimize the code in a way that successive operations are independent of each other, then a multi core processor is better able to keep all cores working in parallel.
b) and c) are somewhat intertwined, because redesigning software to take advantage of a multi threaded model means also that you have to loose the dependance of different operations in your program and to design your algorithms in a way that most of it can be executed in parallel.
So as a conclusion: You will probably notice a speed advantage by going multicore from the beginning, because some of the conditions are already meet. A processor can dispatch operations to different cores even though the software may not be optimized for that. So a slight increase of speed is to expect even from very old software. As you add newer software to your computer and update your operation system, other speed ups will be possible.
All languages I know the words for "sun" and "moon" in, don't differentiate the genders grammatically (like English), or they have a male sun and a female moon. Just German has a female sun and a male moon.
In German normally the natural gender determines the grammatical gender. There are a few exceptions as everywhere in language though. For instance the queen of a bee hive is either called "die Koenigin" (queen, female) or "der Weisel" (male).
Maedchen is NO exception, because it is a diminuitive, and they are neuter in all cases (maybe because for little or infantile people you shouldn't expect any gender at all. If the natural gender has fully grown, they are not infantile anymore and loose neutrality in gender).
The origin is "die Maid" or "die Magd" (both female), where "die Maid" refers mostly to a young woman, and "die Magd" refers to a female unmarried subordinate or servant, but they have the same root, and their usage was often interchanged in literature and depending on the region. In modern German neither "Maid" nor "Magd" is often used.
You have the same situation with "Fraeulein" (literally: little woman), which was once used to refer to an unmarried woman, which is also neuter in grammar and thus probably meant to suppress the natural gender, because only a married woman was supposed to be a real woman of female gender, ready to give birth and raise children. The use of "Fraeulein" is disencouraged in modern German though.
A male "See" (lake) means something else than a female "See" (sea). The female "die See" has is origin in the Low German language (the language of the northern, flat regions), while the male "der See" comes from High German (the language of the southern, mountainous regions), where one refers to "die See" (sea) mostly as "das Meer".
Interestingly though the dutch language, neighbour to Low German geographically and ethymologically, uses both words in reverse: "de zee" means the sea, and "het meer" means the lake. You can find the same usage in northern Germany, where one of the greatest lakes is called "das Steinhuder Meer" (lake of Steinhude).
But it is a good rule of thumb to expect a german word to have the same grammatical gender than the word's counterpart in reality or imagination.
It's no accident, for example, that the "sungod", the "moongodess", various gods for weather and bad or good hunting/harvest whatever developed multiple times independently.
Interestingly though in the German language the sun (die Sonne) is female, and the moon (der Mond) is male. I know of no other language with this unique feature. Most languages, if they differentiate the sexus for sun and moon, describe the sun as male and the moon as female. What does this tell us about Germans? (And yes, this makes the translation of myths and legends into German somewhat squirky:) )
After being to the site of Akrotiri, I have to say: The town of Akrotiri has been destroyed by the volcano several times and rebuilt again and again. Curiously the last findings show wellpreserved walls with beautiful paintings, large storage areas with amphores filled with crops, but no money, no jewels, no dead men and only a small amount of tools. All the buildings are about the same age and have been buried only a few years after they were built. All this is nice for the tourists, but rather disappointing for the archaeologists, because money is a quite good base to set up a timeline and find out about trading routes, and tools are some of the most important things to tell about the niveau of knowledge in a society and to determine cultural roots and relations to other cultures.
So the theory goes this: When Akrotiri finally was covered by the volcanic outbreak in 1600 BC, the really big bang that destroyed the island was already history, and the people were already in progress to rebuilt it, thus all buildings are about the same age. It was not inhabited anymore. It was a ghost town, where the inhabitants went away before the next outbreak which seemed to be near, taking with them only the things they could carry: Tools, money, jewels, and the animals which could walk on their own. It seems that the last outbreak of the volcano had told them a lesson, and the people of Akrotiri were prepared.
So if Thera/Santorini was the site of the legendary Atlantis, then all the ancient wisdom the Atlanteans possessed hasn't been lost, but spread around by the people fleeing Akrotiri. So either Thera wasn't Atlantis at all, or the famous Atlantean wisdom wasn't lost by the destroying of their home, but it influenced stronger than before the surrounding settlements and ancient towns.
The Vatican learned a lot from the lesson of Galileo; even if it did take them until the 20th century to acknowledge so publicly. The Catholic church does seem to be keeping up with the times, however; contraception being one example of sorts...
Yes. The Vatican learned that it's no good to intervene into a scholar dispute between different universities.
The original dispute has not been one of Galileo Galilei vs. the Roman Catholic Church, but it was a long standing feud between the University Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Bologna. While most early universities (mostly in Italy) were founded in the 12th and 13th century by either local aristocracy or the citizens of the rich north italian towns to provide education to the offsprings of the aristrocracy and the citizenry, Sorbonne in Paris was founded by monks to provide an equal niveau of education to the clerical cadre.
Because of that different background, scholars and pupils of the different universities were always in feud against each other, damning the different roots and thus the different curricula at the other universities.
Galileo Galilei was involved into many of those scientific disputes, and he wrote his Discurso (1612), which summed up his standing in the dispute. And he basicly said: "I am right, and you all are wrong", which caused an uproar at the quite conservative Sorbonne. So the Sorbonne scholars tried to get something we would call today a "cease and desist" indictment against Galileo Galilei, based on the fact that he was claiming omniscence and supporting the Copernican System, which was called a heresy, even though it was widely used by astronomers and navigators at the time, because it made the calculations of star and planete positions so much easier, after J. Kepler corrected the basic flaws in 1597 (Normally one should talk about the Keplerian System instead of the Copernican anyway, even though Mikolasz Kopernik came up with the solar centric idea first. His book got into print in 1574, the year of his death. But the mathematics necessary to calculate within the Copernican System were no better than the old Ptolemaian. Same epicycles everywhere!).
It took another 20 years for the Vatican to finally take the case and invite Galileo Galilei to come to Rome and defend himself. Pope Urban VIII even gave Galileo Galilei a free pass to use the Copernican System in 1624, when he was freshly elected Pope, provided he called it a "mathematical theory" and not the truth. At this time the pope was involved in serveral battles anyway: The age of discovery and colonization was in full swing, having good and reliable astronomical data thus was a necessity, and the Roman Catholic Church was interested in the results and the baptizing of all the heathens out there. In the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, the 30year war was fought between the german protestants and the german catholics, with heavy involvement of Sweden and France. The protestant countries were adverse to all those new astronomical ideas anyway. It took more than 200 years until all german protestant countries took over the new calendar!
So the matter wasn't really urgent to the Vatican at all. Galileo Galilei got the letter in October 1632 and finally went to Rome in May 1633. There he was never incarcerated, as often portrayed in popular books and plays, but because he was employed by the Florentinian Medici family at this time, he lived as a guest in the Villa Medici in Rome (not really a dungeon, even though the family Medici had some fame to throw people they didn't like into dungeons...)
Finally Galileo Galilei was disgusted with the internal struggle inside the Vatican, which forced Pope Urban VIII to withdraw from his former stand, and felt himself and his Discurso being just some pawns in the game, which he didn't like. So in court, he didn't dispute, but withdraw everything he stated and stepped down from his role as teacher at Florence University, to get out of the game ongoing in Rome. With him
Interesting how VW is buying the naming rights to famous names. They also have rights to use the Rolls Royce name. Still just VW inside.
No. They haven't. When VW bought the assets of Rolls-Royce Automotive, they had to give the Rolls-Royce brand to BMW. So all you can get from VW is the Bentley brand (beside the Lamborghini and Bugatti).
Volkswagen still has a very volkswagen like brand, and it is one of the most profitable in the group: Skoda. They use the VW wide platforms and just get it right: Highly usable and affordable. Sadly the Volkswagen brand itself gets more and more expensive with increasing quality problems. The same platform performs better in quality if you buy it from Skoda.
If I lived under a brutal dictatorship, I'd want someone to intervene on my behalf...
If I lived under a brutal dictatorship I would do everything to end it myself. Oh wait... I did that already. But it was another country and another dictator I got rid of. So maybe my opinion doesn't count.
And for sure: I would curse the country that basicly said: You are incompetent to deal with your dictator on your own, which we let go 10 years ago because we didn't want him away at this point. So this time we will bomb you into shock and awe, then we wreck or let wreck every public service that is and stop you from rebuilding it because we promised the contracts to our buddies first.
What happened to let people decide for their destiny themselves? How long would Saddam Hussein have been in power if the U.S. just said: We don't care? One year? Two? Ok. There is the argument that this would have meant another 10000 or 20000 dead people on the hand of Saddam Hussein's regime every year.
How is that worse or better than the probably 30000 dead young men enlisted to the Iraqi army and the 15000 dead civilians? The so feared Republican Guards just disappeared. Those actively supporting Saddam Hussein knew when to hide. But not the young people who were serving an army they probably didn't like, but which died by defending the home of their families.
I can't hear anymore the argument that it was best for Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein by first bombing the land into chaos and then fail to have a contingency plan. What if Iraqi people were able to sort out Saddam Hussein themselves? Did anyone ever looked at the alternatives?
Or was it that Saddam Hussein had to be removed by external force because otherwise the Iraqi would have dealt with him, and then the U.S. couldn't close the ring around Iran and Russia, because a selfliberated Iraq may have had no incentive to let them in?
So Microsoft offeres trainings for the new software versions for free? Look at it like this: Installing a new desktop, if it's called MS Windows next version or any else, causes training costs. So your argument would be valid only if you are still using that first Windows version you ever installed.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you know where the old wisdom "Never touch a running system" comes from.
Yes and now. Every chemical analysis is basicly guessing, because no substance presents itself: Hey, I am Carbonbihydroxide! There are several tests which can give you a quite conclusive set of clues, what substance you are looking at. "Quite conclusive" in this case means: Better than 0.999999... probability.
That's the same way server fingerprinting works. Run several tests, and each of them increases the probability for one and lowers the probability for others. It gets quite hard to modify a server in a way that it responds exactly like another one (error messages, timing, matchting between OS type and DNS server: You won't find WINS running on OpenVMS that easily.)
Of course it's not definitive. But it gets very close to several nines in probability.
Ok. Take any Peugeot (Peugeot sells all Diesel engines with particle cleaner). If you have a Ford Focus, you should compare against a Peugeot 307hdi with similar displacement. I guess they are absolutely comparable in emissions. The Peugeot just gets about half the distance more from a gallon.
So after all, given the same technical effort put into cleaning gasoline exhaust and diesel exhaust, they are on the same level.
Currently for a Diesel to get to the same cleanliness level than a gasoline engine, you just need an oxydation catalysator, differently than for gasoline, where you have to have a lambda sond regulated catalysator, which does both, either burning the remainings of the gasoline or reducing the nitroxyde (basicly a lambda catalysator is just trying to balance the amount of unburnt gasoline and carbonmonoxyde against the creation of nitroxyde).
In Europe you can already buy several cars fitted with Diesel cleaner (oxydation catalysator), and the Diesel is required to be low in sulfur.
This is not correct. Modern vine plants consists of two different parts. The root is from american wild vines, which are resistant agains the vine louse. The vine louse is an insect of american origin which lives on vine roots. The european vine species aren't resistant against this insect, so when the vine louse came with some infected vines from America, it caused a catastrophe. Talk about monocultures...
The part of the plant which is above the earth is still the old, traditional european vine. The noble vine gets transplanted onto its cousin's roots, its own roots are cut off and similar the twigs of the base vine. If you plant such a two part vine, you have to take care. If you put it to high in the earth, the base vine may grow its own twigs, which don't carry the right grapes. And if you plant it too deep, the noble vine may grow roots, which can be attacked by the vine louse.
So european law demands that all vine plants are two part, with a vine louse resistant base vine, to avoid a second attack by the vine louse.
Next time you have chance to visit a vineyard, pay a look to the vines. Where they grow out of the earth, they have a thicker, round part. This is, where base vine and noble vine are transplanted together.
Nobody says "windows" as a generic term for "operating system" unless they are terminally stupid.
I remember once to dispute with a quite intelligent but somewhat computer illiterate woman about the weaknesses of Windows. She was contradicting me the whole time and not accepting the flaws I pointed out.
Later I realized she was using a Mac, and for her the Mac desktop was "Windows" because it had many of them. Talk about generic terms...
Ok, ok... for the sake of the joke I ignored the difference between "capital" and "seat of Parliament and Government" ;)
No. It was indeed a wise man from the Netherlands. ;) )
But the Netherlands are so unimportant in the view of the world, that the world even don't get the capital right. "Just some small, quite prosperous country at the Northern Sea... Was it t'Gravenhage? Or Copenhagen?" (The Hague is called in Dutch Den Haag or t'Gravenhage
The biggest problem with semantic meta data is, that Semantics are still unparseable for programs. Otherwise we would already have the program that understands newspapers and answers questions about the articles.
There will always be something you can't fit in the current semantic model. And you can't foresee the exact semantic someone is questioning when your piece of information may be useful to him. Semantic meta data is nothing else than predicting the questions someone may ask about your content. There will always be a question you didn't thought about, even though your content may answer it.
You can easily try it for yourself: Think a simple statement like "The sky is blue", and then start to find questions where this statement is a correct answer. "How is the sky?", "What is blue?" are just the trivial ones. What if someone asks "How's the weather with you?", or "What is the visual result of the Raleigh dispersion?"
As you can easily see: There are hundreds and thousands of possible semantic meta data to even a simple statement. A codified semantic metadata system will always be a subset of the possible, and the subset does not necessarily cover your needs. Semantic metadata, as it currently is used, is no semantic at all, it's just an extended syntax, because programs can analyze syntax, but they don't understand semantics. It is an old hope in the AI research, that a sufficiently sophisticated syntax will magically turn into semantics, but we didn't reach the point yet.
Now, WHAT IF there was actually code copying into Linux? How useful would Groklaw be then, if every day it was 'bad news'?
Then a more technical site as Groklaw would have tried to find out, what parts of the code are actually tainted and should be replaced as soon as possible. Thus we may have a slightly different kernel now, probably with some parts of code reviewed and better coded than before, which otherwise no one would ever have looked into because they just worked (UNIX has 30 years of development and bugfixing behind, so some of the code may be quite bugfree, even though somewhat dated and not fully profiled for today's use.)
Groklaw is just one line of defense in the case Intellectual Property claims vs. Free Software/Open Source. There are others. Stacked behind or defending other places. It is important to have them even though they may not be attacked in the current case. With Groklaw's help Linux (and together with Linux) the Free Software movement looks more clean than one year before, when the suspicion of inadvertedly added code was not easily to rebuff because of still unsorted information.
Now you can even quote the case to the FUD affected C(E/T/I)Os and tell them: Look: A company in possession of the full source code of UNIX, AIX, Dynix and Linux and with a clear dedication to find infringement had had more than one year's time, and it still can't come up with a single line of code in Linux that was tainted. How many cases of IP theft have been decided in the closed source world in the same time against the infringer, even though the plaintiff didn't even had access to the source code? If you really want to avoid legal hassles about infringment, go with open source and free software, because in the other world you never know.
This is the most misunderstood ruling concerning links in the whole of Germany's juridical history.
The Hamburg ruling effectively said: A general disclaimer doesn't get you out of prison. And what do all those webmasters? They put a general disclaimer in their website, citing the ruling and say: It has to be, otherwise we will be in prison.
Doesn't anyone ever bothered to read the ruling at all?
The Hamburg ruling was against a webmaster who tried to argue that the link he was putting on his website was legal because of the disclaimer in which he stated that he refused responsibility for all links he was providing. And the court said: If you want to distance yourself from the contents a link may provide, you have to do so either specifically in the context of each link, or you have to explain why you can't take responsibility for certain links.
Look at it like this: If someone asks you were he could get cheap car electronics, and you say: Don't make me responsible, but I would try the flea market over there, they sell electronics "dropped from the truck", you are supporting crime, even though you put the general disclaimer in front.
If you say: Stay away from the flea market, they may be cheap, but I doubt the legality of their offerings, then you make clear, what you think about those offerings. This would have been a valid disclaimer.
Be very, very careful with the general disclaimer. One of the linked sites may sue you for libel, because if you distance yourself from them without valid cause, you are just badmouthing them.
And puhlease! Before you are going to put one of those cut&paste disclaimers citing the Hamburg ruling on your website, either read the ruling yourself or ask someone with some law background about the consequences. Those disclaimers don't help you. That's what the ruling, you are quoting, says. The justice will just shake his head and ask you: Why do you quote the ruling and in the same step do exactly the thing the ruling was damning?!
You are not wrong, but an exception. Being a sysadmin I can tell you that having OOo ready saves my day every week, when an user comes to me again complaining about not being able to open a document with Word.
Excel makes less problems to me, but I think that Excel was and is the best product Microsoft has to offer anyway. They were quite lucky with their decision in 1987 to drop MultiPlan and buy Excel instead.
And? There are enough third world countries from 50 years ago that now are an economic tread to the U.S. economy. Think about China, India, South Korea, Taiwan... they don't have the same standard of living than the U.S., but they are successfully attracting U.S. business or took it already away from U.S. Clothing and consumer electronics are no U.S. industries anymore.
Other countries are falling back and are now thirdworldly, even though they looked so promising 50 years ago. Argentinia for instance once was the seventh largest economy in the world.
Most countries that are fighting each other and spreading AIDS as you said, weren't even countries 50 years ago. In most of Africa, the movement towards independence just started 50 years ago (Algeria 1956), and it didn't succeed everywhere for another 15 years.
It is still the flag of Bremen, a city and state in the north of Germany, where probably the EADS facility is located which built the prototype.
A german court can't award financial damage during a criminal process. If you want to claim financial damage, then you have to enter the trial as a "Nebenklaeger" (secondary plaintiff) and prove that you were financially damaged by the actions of the defendant.
I guess most people will be afraid to fully disclose in court how their IT management works and how their other business processes run to prove the amount of money they have lost due to Sasser.
I don't know where you got the "only" from :) I just mentioned the WinNT Server series as an example.
There are four different approaches to handle several cores.
...have your software being aware of multiple cores and use a multithreaded approach. So calculations can be split into different treads and those dispatched to different cores.
;) ), if the application doesn't use multiple threads.
a) Tread them like different processors. This requires you to use either an SMP capable operating system (virtually all Unices, Windows NT Series Server edition) to fully leverage the advantages, or...
(Operating system level)
b)
(Application level)
c) Have your compiler optimize the software for parallel execution of instruction during the compile process. That means for instance to try to fit operations together in a way that two consecutive operations don't depend on each other.
(Compiler level)
d) In the prefetch queue of the processor check for interdependencies between operations. If two operations are independent of each other you can put them into different cores and execute them in parallel.
(super scalar processor)
Those four approaches are more or less coupled together.
a) is a special case of b), if you call the operation system a special application which governs all other applications. If your computer is supposed to run only a singlethreaded application at a time, then having an SMP operating system doesn't really speed up your work (ok... printing in background works better
On the other hand having no SMP aware operating systems means that one core gets most of the work because it runs all processes. Even multicore aware programs are started on the first processor and only dispatch certain threads to the other cores.
c) and d) are also tightly coupled. If the compiler is able to optimize the code in a way that successive operations are independent of each other, then a multi core processor is better able to keep all cores working in parallel.
b) and c) are somewhat intertwined, because redesigning software to take advantage of a multi threaded model means also that you have to loose the dependance of different operations in your program and to design your algorithms in a way that most of it can be executed in parallel.
So as a conclusion: You will probably notice a speed advantage by going multicore from the beginning, because some of the conditions are already meet. A processor can dispatch operations to different cores even though the software may not be optimized for that. So a slight increase of speed is to expect even from very old software. As you add newer software to your computer and update your operation system, other speed ups will be possible.
You didn't read my post ;)
Spanish
el sol = male.
la luna = female
German
die Sonne = female
der Mond = male
All languages I know the words for "sun" and "moon" in, don't differentiate the genders grammatically (like English), or they have a male sun and a female moon.
Just German has a female sun and a male moon.
In German normally the natural gender determines the grammatical gender. There are a few exceptions as everywhere in language though. For instance the queen of a bee hive is either called "die Koenigin" (queen, female) or "der Weisel" (male).
Maedchen is NO exception, because it is a diminuitive, and they are neuter in all cases (maybe because for little or infantile people you shouldn't expect any gender at all. If the natural gender has fully grown, they are not infantile anymore and loose neutrality in gender).
The origin is "die Maid" or "die Magd" (both female), where "die Maid" refers mostly to a young woman, and "die Magd" refers to a female unmarried subordinate or servant, but they have the same root, and their usage was often interchanged in literature and depending on the region. In modern German neither "Maid" nor "Magd" is often used.
You have the same situation with "Fraeulein" (literally: little woman), which was once used to refer to an unmarried woman, which is also neuter in grammar and thus probably meant to suppress the natural gender, because only a married woman was supposed to be a real woman of female gender, ready to give birth and raise children. The use of "Fraeulein" is disencouraged in modern German though.
A male "See" (lake) means something else than a female "See" (sea). The female "die See" has is origin in the Low German language (the language of the northern, flat regions), while the male "der See" comes from High German (the language of the southern, mountainous regions), where one refers to "die See" (sea) mostly as "das Meer".
Interestingly though the dutch language, neighbour to Low German geographically and ethymologically, uses both words in reverse: "de zee" means the sea, and "het meer" means the lake. You can find the same usage in northern Germany, where one of the greatest lakes is called "das Steinhuder Meer" (lake of Steinhude).
But it is a good rule of thumb to expect a german word to have the same grammatical gender than the word's counterpart in reality or imagination.
It's no accident, for example, that the "sungod", the "moongodess", various gods for weather and bad or good hunting/harvest whatever developed multiple times independently.
:) )
Interestingly though in the German language the sun (die Sonne) is female, and the moon (der Mond) is male. I know of no other language with this unique feature. Most languages, if they differentiate the sexus for sun and moon, describe the sun as male and the moon as female. What does this tell us about Germans? (And yes, this makes the translation of myths and legends into German somewhat squirky
After being to the site of Akrotiri, I have to say: The town of Akrotiri has been destroyed by the volcano several times and rebuilt again and again. Curiously the last findings show wellpreserved walls with beautiful paintings, large storage areas with amphores filled with crops, but no money, no jewels, no dead men and only a small amount of tools. All the buildings are about the same age and have been buried only a few years after they were built. All this is nice for the tourists, but rather disappointing for the archaeologists, because money is a quite good base to set up a timeline and find out about trading routes, and tools are some of the most important things to tell about the niveau of knowledge in a society and to determine cultural roots and relations to other cultures.
So the theory goes this: When Akrotiri finally was covered by the volcanic outbreak in 1600 BC, the really big bang that destroyed the island was already history, and the people were already in progress to rebuilt it, thus all buildings are about the same age. It was not inhabited anymore. It was a ghost town, where the inhabitants went away before the next outbreak which seemed to be near, taking with them only the things they could carry: Tools, money, jewels, and the animals which could walk on their own. It seems that the last outbreak of the volcano had told them a lesson, and the people of Akrotiri were prepared.
So if Thera/Santorini was the site of the legendary Atlantis, then all the ancient wisdom the Atlanteans possessed hasn't been lost, but spread around by the people fleeing Akrotiri. So either Thera wasn't Atlantis at all, or the famous Atlantean wisdom wasn't lost by the destroying of their home, but it influenced stronger than before the surrounding settlements and ancient towns.
The Vatican learned a lot from the lesson of Galileo; even if it did take them until the 20th century to acknowledge so publicly. The Catholic church does seem to be keeping up with the times, however; contraception being one example of sorts...
Yes. The Vatican learned that it's no good to intervene into a scholar dispute between different universities.
The original dispute has not been one of Galileo Galilei vs. the Roman Catholic Church, but it was a long standing feud between the University Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Bologna. While most early universities (mostly in Italy) were founded in the 12th and 13th century by either local aristocracy or the citizens of the rich north italian towns to provide education to the offsprings of the aristrocracy and the citizenry, Sorbonne in Paris was founded by monks to provide an equal niveau of education to the clerical cadre.
Because of that different background, scholars and pupils of the different universities were always in feud against each other, damning the different roots and thus the different curricula at the other universities.
Galileo Galilei was involved into many of those scientific disputes, and he wrote his Discurso (1612), which summed up his standing in the dispute. And he basicly said: "I am right, and you all are wrong", which caused an uproar at the quite conservative Sorbonne. So the Sorbonne scholars tried to get something we would call today a "cease and desist" indictment against Galileo Galilei, based on the fact that he was claiming omniscence and supporting the Copernican System, which was called a heresy, even though it was widely used by astronomers and navigators at the time, because it made the calculations of star and planete positions so much easier, after J. Kepler corrected the basic flaws in 1597 (Normally one should talk about the Keplerian System instead of the Copernican anyway, even though Mikolasz Kopernik came up with the solar centric idea first. His book got into print in 1574, the year of his death. But the mathematics necessary to calculate within the Copernican System were no better than the old Ptolemaian. Same epicycles everywhere!).
It took another 20 years for the Vatican to finally take the case and invite Galileo Galilei to come to Rome and defend himself. Pope Urban VIII even gave Galileo Galilei a free pass to use the Copernican System in 1624, when he was freshly elected Pope, provided he called it a "mathematical theory" and not the truth. At this time the pope was involved in serveral battles anyway: The age of discovery and colonization was in full swing, having good and reliable astronomical data thus was a necessity, and the Roman Catholic Church was interested in the results and the baptizing of all the heathens out there. In the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, the 30year war was fought between the german protestants and the german catholics, with heavy involvement of Sweden and France. The protestant countries were adverse to all those new astronomical ideas anyway. It took more than 200 years until all german protestant countries took over the new calendar!
So the matter wasn't really urgent to the Vatican at all. Galileo Galilei got the letter in October 1632 and finally went to Rome in May 1633. There he was never incarcerated, as often portrayed in popular books and plays, but because he was employed by the Florentinian Medici family at this time, he lived as a guest in the Villa Medici in Rome (not really a dungeon, even though the family Medici had some fame to throw people they didn't like into dungeons...)
Finally Galileo Galilei was disgusted with the internal struggle inside the Vatican, which forced Pope Urban VIII to withdraw from his former stand, and felt himself and his Discurso being just some pawns in the game, which he didn't like. So in court, he didn't dispute, but withdraw everything he stated and stepped down from his role as teacher at Florence University, to get out of the game ongoing in Rome. With him
Interesting how VW is buying the naming rights to famous names. They also have rights to use the Rolls Royce name. Still just VW inside.
No. They haven't. When VW bought the assets of Rolls-Royce Automotive, they had to give the Rolls-Royce brand to BMW. So all you can get from VW is the Bentley brand (beside the Lamborghini and Bugatti).
Volkswagen still has a very volkswagen like brand, and it is one of the most profitable in the group: Skoda. They use the VW wide platforms and just get it right: Highly usable and affordable. Sadly the Volkswagen brand itself gets more and more expensive with increasing quality problems. The same platform performs better in quality if you buy it from Skoda.
If I lived under a brutal dictatorship, I'd want someone to intervene on my behalf...
If I lived under a brutal dictatorship I would do everything to end it myself.
Oh wait... I did that already. But it was another country and another dictator I got rid of. So maybe my opinion doesn't count.
And for sure: I would curse the country that basicly said: You are incompetent to deal with your dictator on your own, which we let go 10 years ago because we didn't want him away at this point. So this time we will bomb you into shock and awe, then we wreck or let wreck every public service that is and stop you from rebuilding it because we promised the contracts to our buddies first.
What happened to let people decide for their destiny themselves? How long would Saddam Hussein have been in power if the U.S. just said: We don't care? One year? Two? Ok. There is the argument that this would have meant another 10000 or 20000 dead people on the hand of Saddam Hussein's regime every year.
How is that worse or better than the probably 30000 dead young men enlisted to the Iraqi army and the 15000 dead civilians? The so feared Republican Guards just disappeared. Those actively supporting Saddam Hussein knew when to hide. But not the young people who were serving an army they probably didn't like, but which died by defending the home of their families.
I can't hear anymore the argument that it was best for Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein by first bombing the land into chaos and then fail to have a contingency plan. What if Iraqi people were able to sort out Saddam Hussein themselves? Did anyone ever looked at the alternatives?
Or was it that Saddam Hussein had to be removed by external force because otherwise the Iraqi would have dealt with him, and then the U.S. couldn't close the ring around Iran and Russia, because a selfliberated Iraq may have had no incentive to let them in?
So Microsoft offeres trainings for the new software versions for free?
Look at it like this: Installing a new desktop, if it's called MS Windows next version or any else, causes training costs. So your argument would be valid only if you are still using that first Windows version you ever installed.